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Deathbed advice

This is us is back on tv. Its a show about a family of triplets – yes it is a LONG story. But in this week’s episode, Randall, who is the voice of morality, the voice of his father (both of them) the voice of vision, spoke to a pastor in a diner.

The pastor said this – “I give a lot of deathbed advice.”  And then he said, (ok I didn’t take it all down word for word), “when you make a hard decision, think about you, old and gray, laying with a pink nursing home blanket over you. Think about what you did in your life that makes you smile. That makes your dad proud.”  Well, yes. Continue reading “Deathbed advice”

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Baptized in the Jordan

You never know what people are going to say – This week I was in a doctor’s office (nice guy) and mentioned I was going to travel to Israel next week. He immediately told me, “My son went to Israel and was able to be baptized in the Jordan”. He was thrilled, clearly to share that with me, and I had many questions, but kept them to myself. “How wonderful” I replied. And the doctor wished me a blessed trip.  Continue reading “Baptized in the Jordan”

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Lutheranism 101 – The Bible

Essentials of Faith. If you wrote a list of essentials of faith, what would it include? Worship, Catechism, The Bible, fellow believers? Just as each of us learn in an individualized way to read, or write, or do math, so we each learn about Faith in our own way. But the Bible is a central piece of that. God gave us a legacy of documents (yes, they were individual documents before they were compiled) and we have learned about Faith and God and ourselves from them for thousands of years. This statement has a lot of ‘weight’ to it, though, doesn’ t it? I meet people all the time who are so intimidated by the enormity of the Bible that they have never gotten the bravery together to study the Bible, or even read it for pleasure. And, in my experience, folks ‘build a wall’ of their own perceived inadequacies as far as the Bible, and keep their distance from the Bible as though it had an electric fence around it. That’s too bad. Continue reading “Lutheranism 101 – The Bible”

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Why church for Christmas?

I took the picture of the sanctuary at Holy Cross last week, after the last of the Advent decorations went up. Light, dark, luminarias on the chancel, and the Creche. These elements are the reason I go to church.

Life is far from easy. The nights are cold right now, and I take note of the humanity huddled on the streets of our town. I have the privilege of knowing about so much of the struggle that people I know and serve as pastor are going through. There is grief, there is emptiness, there are feelings of failure, and fear for the future.

So I go to church. Because I have found people there to be trying hard to be real – not to hide behind busy-ness and noise – but to let the story of Christmas touch them.  Continue reading “Why church for Christmas?”